[OS X TeX] TeXShop question

[Richard Koch]

Nicolae,

> On Feb 8, 2016, at 5:27 PM, Nicolae Garleanu <garleanu at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> Related, though strictly speaking maybe requiring a new thread: what is the purpose of the appendage “ — Edited” to a file name in the source file, which only seems to go away if one actively saves the file (e.g., Cmd-S)? That is, what’s the point if the file is saved anyway, automatically? Is it perhaps saved in a hidden, temp file? My impression (which I did not verify rigorously, but I don’t save explicitly often) is that even if I don’t save automatically, on a different computer (I use dropbox) I open the latest version. If so, what does “edited” alert me to? Am I perhaps missing something?
> Thank you.
> Nicolae
> 

Thanks for raising this question. When I replied to Justin Walker, my brain told
me that there was a missing detail, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

Automatic saving works something like this (my details may be wrong, but
the idea is correct): every few minutes, the Mac saves, but it only saves changes,
not the entire file. These changes don’t go to the main file, but instead another
place on the disk. 

The Mac updates the actually main file whenever it could conceivably be
important. For instance, if you duplicate that file, you’ll get the current state of
the file. There are LOTS of other “for instances”.

Users also have the ability to “Save”. This is more significant than
the random automatic saves of Cocoa because it creates 
what Cocoa calls a “version.” 
These versions are what show up in the time line when you call up Time
Machine or the equivalent. Other saves are eventually merged together 
to create additional versions.

Because of this design, if you use Time Machine to go back, you don’t see
absolutely every change. You see the significant changes (which are further
pruned weekly and monthly).

When TeXShop for Lion was first released, it SAVED VERSIONS just before
typesetting. This meant that users who typeset after every other sentence had
hundreds of files to plow through just to see the daily activity. Luckily, a user
wrote me explaining how to save WITHOUT creating a version. So now,
Time Machine will show selected changes throughout the day, but not
annoyingly many.

OK. The answer to your question is that “—Edited” means that the
document has changed since the last Version was created. So more recent
changes are on disk, but might conceivably be pruned away soon. If you
do something you really, really don’t want to lose, issue a “SAVE” menu
command to create a version, and then “—Edited” goes away.

Incidentally, I never do this and just let the Mac prune and otherwise do
its thing, and the system seems to work fine. A few times, I did something
stupid and really lost text, and each time that happened, Time Machine
found the missing text.

Dick